Trump's DOJ Should Quit Fighting Maurene Comey and Say Why It Fired Her

Judge Jesse Furman ruled the firing of James Comey's daughter unlawful, and the Justice Department says it will appeal.

When the Justice Department fired Maurene Comey, the only explanation her boss gave her, she said, was that the order "came from Washington," NBC News reported. She'd been a federal prosecutor in Manhattan for nearly a decade. That was the whole explanation.

On Monday, U.S. District Judge Jesse Furman ruled the firing unlawful and ordered her reinstated. A department spokesperson told NBC News it disagrees and will appeal. It shouldn't. Reinstatement isn't enough, and fighting it is worse. The department should drop the appeal and say plainly why it pushed James Comey's daughter out. I think the answer is her last name. If it's something else, the department has had more than a year to say so.

Most of the remedy is on paper. Furman made the reinstatement retroactive, with back pay from her July 2025 firing through Dec. 20, 2025, when she took another job, CBS News reported. She's in private practice now and isn't asking for her old desk back, the Associated Press reported. What she gets is a corrected record and about five months of pay.

Her record deserved better. Every annual review from 2019 through 2024 rated her "outstanding," and the department conceded as much in its own court papers, CBS News reported. Her cases included Sean "Diddy" Combs, Jeffrey Epstein, Ghislaine Maxwell and former Sen. Bob Menendez. The department never argued she'd done the job badly. Instead, NBC News reported, it argued that then-Attorney General Pam Bondi could fire her at will, for no reason at all.

"No reason" is still an answer, and look at who it landed on. Her father is the FBI director President Donald Trump fired in 2017, and Trump has repeatedly called for him to be jailed, the AP reported. This administration has indicted James Comey twice, according to CBS News. One case was thrown out. The second rests on the administration's claim that an Instagram photo of seashells threatened Trump, and it's on hold until early 2027 at the soonest while a judge decides whether to toss it, NBC News reported. He denies wrongdoing.

The best pushback is the old line that prosecutors serve at the pleasure of the executive. Furman answered it. Congress gave the attorney general the power to remove her, he wrote, but it also put limits on that power, "limits that, even Defendants concede, were violated in Comey's case." And the government's bigger claim, that Congress can't regulate the removal of prosecutors at all, goes against nearly two centuries of Supreme Court precedent, he wrote.

That's why the explanation matters more than the check. Her lawsuit also leaned on free speech. Furman wants more briefing from both sides before he rules on that count, and he signaled he'd probably throw it out as mostly moot, given that she doesn't want the job back, AP reported. A court may never rule on why she was fired. Only the department can answer that now.

An appeal wouldn't really be about her anyway. Furman wrote that the department "invented a new and expansive theory of executive power" and has used it to remove other federal employees who'd long been protected from firing, NBC News reported. AP reported that scores of career people have been pushed out, among them prosecutors and FBI agents tied to Trump investigations or viewed as hostile to his agenda. Appealing this ruling keeps that theory alive for the next one.

Comey was told her firing came from Washington. A federal judge has now ruled that Washington broke the law. The least Washington owes her is the rest of the sentence.

Source: The Guardian, retrieved October 26, 2026. Other sources: NBC News, CBS News, pbs.org.